Ian Willoughby schreibt in seinem Artikel "BigMag looks at post-1989 alt mags and 'zines" über eine Ausstellung alternativer Zeitschriften im DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prag: "Most of the five dozen magazines and close to 100 fanzines currently displayed at Dox are wall-mounted in clear plastic jackets, alongside blown-up front covers. Meanwhile, piles of some of the mags that enjoyed bigger print runs are also available to leaf through".

Die BigMag-Datenbank, die noch mehr dieser Publikationen verzeichnet, findet sich auf www.bigmag.cz. Zum Hintergrund des Projekts heißt es dort: "BigMag is a showcase of magazines which are otherwise not easy to find as they have never been displayed at eye level on the newsstands. Chance is they didn't make it to the newsstands at all. Some of them were published just once; others were for years just few Xeroxed copies held together with a glue stick. Some of them became a breeding ground for maverick journalists and some of them are now to be seen in design handbooks. Most of them have never gained any official recognition. But each of them is a testimonial to someone’s passion for distilling actual events and repeatedly communicating with the world through assemblage of text and image on paper".

Montag, 21. März 2011

"Nowadays, every sub-genre of music from every continent is just a Google search away, and zines have been replaced by blogs. But what if you began publishing your zine through Kindle?" fragt sich Jef With One F in seinem Artikel "Could Kindle Self-Publishing Spark A Zine Revival?".

Noch interessanter finde ich aber die Passagen über Star Wars. Anderson schreibt, dass er seine Kinder vor die Wahl stellte, einen der offiziellen Star Wars-Filme in HD und Surround Sound (inkl. Popcorn) oder Lego-Stop-Motion-Filme von Gleichaltrigen auf YouTube anzuschauen. Sie wählten ohne langes Zögern die selbstproduzierten Animationsfilme: "It turns out that my kids, and many like them, aren't really that interested in Star Wars as created by George Lucas. They're more interested in Star Wars as created by their peers, never mind the shaky cameras and the fingers in the frame. (...) The demand for stop-action Star Wars must have always been there, but just invisible because no marketer thought to offer it. But once we had YouTube, and didn't need a marketer's permission to do things, an invisible market suddenly emerged" (S. 194).

Im Kapitel "Nonmonetary economies. Where money doesn't rule, what does?" beschäftigt sich Anderson mit der Motivation von Menschen, z.B. Wikipedia-Artikel (und ich ergänze: Fan Fiction) zu schreiben: "In short, doing things we like without pay makes us happier than the work we do for a salary. (...) The opportunity to contribute in a way that is both creative and appreciated is exactly the sort of fulfillment that Maslow privileged above all other aspirations, and what many jobs so seldom provide. No wonder the Web exploded, driven by volunteer labor - it made people happy to be creative, to contribute, to have an impact, and to be recognized as an expert in something" (S. 189).

Montag, 14. März 2011

Ja, auch ich bin ohne Internetz aufgewachsen... "I'm a kid of the '70's, a teen of the '80's. I remember a time long before there was an interweb, back when fanzines were largely delivered by mail-in subscription or shady dudes in trenchcoats hanging out at the fringes of comic book and Star Trek conventions. Back then the coolest path to self-affirmation was seeing your slightly-desperate letter begging Keith Giffen to bring back Ambush Bug reprinted in a DC comic". - Tobias J McGuffin: "Show Me Your Lightning Bolt!". In: Gestalt Mash, 2. März 2011

"In the late 70s, there was a lot of Star Trek fan fiction flying around in the fanzines and small presses. This group of writers was poised at just the right moment in history - after the beat generation's free love movement, but before the homophobic AIDS scare - to generate the phenomenon of what we now call Slash Fiction, a genre of fan fiction which places two, usually heterosexual, characters from a popular fantasy property into a homosexual relationship. (...) These, mostly female, fan fiction writers, saw a homoerotic element in the relationship between these characters, a certain dynamic which they felt could only be explained by sexual tension".

"This book re-evaluates the way we examine today's digital media environment. By looking at how popular culture uses different digital technologies, Digital Fandom bolsters contemporary media theory by introducing new methods of analysis. Using the exemplars of alternate reality gaming and fan studies, this book takes into account a particular 'philosophy of playfulness' in today's media in order to establish a 'new media studies'. Digital Fandom augments traditional studies of popular media fandom with descriptions of the contemporary fan in a converged media environment. The book shows how changes in the study of fandom can be applied in a larger scale to the study of new media in general, and formulates new conceptions of traditional media theories".

"It seems that empirical data about fans can really only come from one of two sources. We can either ethnographically study fan communities, by joining fan groups, participating in fan discussions, or otherwise involving ourselves with fans; or, we can analyze fan-created texts that populate fan culture. (...) It is relatively easy to study either communities or texts, but it is relatively difficult to do both at once".